The Application of Hardware in the Loop for Single Phase Converters Based on DSP Controller at Solar Energy Systems

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to build an effective Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation platform for developing and testing DSP-controlled power converters. The HIL is a form of real-time simulation and differs from conventional simulations. The real-time requirements for such simulations depend on the time-scale of the process and the simulated components involved. A high-performance real-time simulation environment is necessary to obtain high precision results when time steps are too small. In this study, the detailed implementation of a very-low-cost real-time HIL simulation using open-source operating system and a relatively advanced hardware platform using averaged switch approach for the embedded controllers is presented. The proposed system consists of PC-based open-source Real Time Operation System (RTOS) and DSP. The sample rate of this system is reduced to 15 μs range based on RTOS. As an example, the HIL testing approach is applied for the controller design of AC-DC Power Factor Correction (PFC) converter. The consistency of the experimental results with the theoretical results proves the applicability of the proposed testing approach. This approach will be useful for power electronics application of solar systems. 